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Fil5000 posted:Guys I just stumbled onto an amazing opportunity Wow, I cant wait to learn all about how Ham flipping works from sketchy looking dude. He's got to be really selling this information for a lot right? 10,000, 15,000? $500 ?!!!!!! You've got to be kidding me! See you later suckers! I'm taking this ham to the bank!
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Feb 12, 2024 11:19
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Going ham over this opportunity
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Feb 12, 2024 17:13
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Wait was that real, I only watched till I saw.it was.about ham and laughed at the joke.
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Feb 12, 2024 17:57
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Soonmot posted:Wait was that real, I only watched till I saw.it was.about ham and laughed at the joke. I don't think it's real. This investment advice is his real one. https://www.instagram.com/reel/Cy04g10rcip/?igsh=MXhyZ2YwbDB6cjJyZg==
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Feb 12, 2024 19:27
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Here's a story about how a financial columnist was scammed by a fake FBI agent into putting 50k in a shoebox and giving it to some guy in a SUV outside her house. https://www.thecut.com/article/amazon-scam-call-ftc-arrest-warrants.html
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Feb 16, 2024 07:44
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I'm pretty surprised the bank didn't ask more questions before handing over 50k in cash. Most banks don't have 50k in cash to just give you without advance notice nowadays.
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Feb 16, 2024 08:11
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Being a rich failchild probably helps there: https://twitter.com/leylaaa31/status/1758324417434648936
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Feb 16, 2024 08:16
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I'm sorry I'm trying to have sympathy but some of the details have me lol. Texting a copy of the CIA agent's badge. The idea that if you were under surveillance, the government would tell you - and spill all the details of your case over an unsecured phone line. But the funniest part is when she's given a case number. "I googled the case number - nothing" LOL!!!! Like even if the scam were true - that's not how case numbers work.
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Feb 16, 2024 11:52
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DeeplyConcerned posted:
If you kinda sorta remember hearing about that one time a friend had to go to court you could think that would work.
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Feb 16, 2024 19:45
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People in the comments like to say that 'anyone' can fall for these, but I really don't see how a scam like this would work on me because there are several points where the whole thing would be averted. People who don't understand some basics of how fraud, scams, and the legal system work are really common and could certainly fall for something like this, but I find the responses that are essentially 'wow, this could happen to anyone, it's so scary' to be pretty upsetting - pointing out the various red flags and simple ways that the scam could be derailed would be so much better for people who might fall for this than 'there's nothing you could have done!'. Amazon calling instead of sending an email is already a little suspicious, and in general if I get a call from a company about fraud and it's not quickly resolved, I'm going to get a name and case number and call back on their published phone line to be sure. If someone who supposedly works for Amazon wants to transfer me to someone not at Amazon, especially some kind of lawyer or investigator, I probably ditch the whole thing as 'scam', and otherwise I again would get the contact name and call the published number to get to the person. People saying they're from the FTC or CIA (who don't even operate on US soil) would also be another stop button. If a cop of any sort starts saying something threatening, and especially if they say not to talk to a lawyer, I'm going to immediately go to a lawyer because either they're a scammer or I really need a lawyer yesterday because I'm actually under investigation for something. If I had $50k sitting in a bank account for emergencies I would be even more likely to go to a lawyer, since that would easily cover any retainer and would definitely qualify as an emergency. I can certainly understand panicing because it seems like something terrible is going on and someone is talking fast, but my panic response if it seems like LEOs are coming after me is to cling to a lawyer for dear life, not to empty my bank account into a bag and hand it to a strange car.
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Feb 18, 2024 19:37
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You know how spam works as a numbers game, where you're easily able to spot the fraud 99.999% of the time, but every so often the perfect storm of being too tired to think, the mail not getting caught, and some confluence of events that makes it plausible to you? Confidence scams work the same way. 99.999% of the time it's laughable, but then there's that one impossibly small combination of events that makes your brain just broken enough to listen to the premise, and at that point they're just using psychological tricks to keep you from thinking hard enough about it to realize what's happening. Everyone likes to think they're too smart to be a sucker. Con artists love this, because you're absolutely not.
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Feb 18, 2024 20:23
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I don't believe your assertion that confidence scams are so magically good that everyone could fall for any of them. This scam had numerous pieces where someone with a small amount of situational awareness, common sense, and/or background information could catch the scam and cause it to fail. I think that teaching people to look out for the incredibly easy to spot red flags and adopt some basic protective behaviors (like calling the institution the person claims to be working for on their published number) does help protect against these, and that is supported by the fact that banks and law enforcement actively encourage people to call a main number if anything seems off. Minor scams and spam are different, giving some guy pocket money or clicking a link or entering a credit card is certainly something I could fall for, so I don't even fall into your 'thinks they're too smart to be a sucker' category. But going to the bank, withdrawing my entire savings account, putting the cash in a paper bag, and handing it to some dude in a car is absolutely not something that a person could convince me to do with any amount of talking, period. You can assert that there's some guy who's going to roll a natural 20 and convince me to, but that's just an assertion, and the fact that there are a lot of people who haven't emptied their bank account into a paper bag argues against it being something that can just happen. And like I said above, for the specific scam mentioned, even if they managed to convince me that they were a CIA agent investigating me, my response to believing that would be to stop talking to the CIA agent without a lawyer because if I was somehow the target of a major LEO investigation, that's the only option that has any chance of not being catastrophically bad for me.
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Feb 18, 2024 23:15
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Pantaloon Pontiff posted:Amazon calling instead of sending an email is already a little suspicious, and in general if I get a call from a company about fraud and it's not quickly resolved, I'm going to get a name and case number and call back on their published phone line to be sure. Amazon called me for real once, but the key is that they didn't ask me for any personal information over the phone: I'd just bought a laptop, five minutes later I get a call saying "this is Amazon, did you just buy a laptop", I say yes, call over. I got a call from my bank once to inform me that my card had been compromised that went pretty much the same way: your card's been compromised, we can't tell you how but it's probably not your fault, you can't use it, you don't have to do anything, we'll send you a new one. And then I got a new one in the mail 2 days later. It's honestly probably a good thing for me to have received calls like that in my life so that I know how the legit ones actually go.
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Feb 19, 2024 00:19
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I thought about this thread early today doing my good son deed as tech support for 81 year old father. Dad got a new phone and asked me to help him log into his Yahoo! Mail account. Surprisingly, he knew both his email address and password! And, since I enabled it for him a few years ago, 2FA was turned on! Which was all good until… The only 2FA options were his old work phone number and old work email address…. Oops. Not surprisingly, the free Yahoo help article doesn’t offer a way to self-troubleshoot this online and instead directs you to call for Premium Support. The process was actually quite painless and involved verifying my dad’s identity by providing front and back of ID, a selfie, verifying a code sent through text and then giving a credit card to sign up for their $12.99/mo security suite subscription (LOL). So I gave them a one-time credit card number and got him unlocked. And then got off the phone and had to explain to Mom and Dad how they should literally never do anything of the things I just did because that was a textbook way to get scammed. It felt so wrong to do at every step of the way but I did take every precaution (looked the support number up on the yahoo website, gave a one-time credit card, etc.). Anyway, be safe out there!
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Feb 19, 2024 00:40
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Pantaloon Pontiff posted:I don't believe your assertion that confidence scams are so magically good that everyone could fall for any of them. Well duh. Scamming is a numbers game. Scams are for specific types of people and no one is capable of falling for all of them wholesale. That's why the scammers cast the widest possible net they can. And you, oh great scam detector, can be a victim if the circumstances meet your specific criteria. Those criteria are probably vanishingly unlikely because of your skepticism but it's the height of avarice to assume you are immune. There's a story about a good scam sniffing youtuber who fell for the fake youtube support scam and lost his account because through a combination of spear phishing and highly convincing email spoofing it looked completely legitimate.
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Feb 19, 2024 03:42
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quote:someone with a small amount of situational awareness, common sense, and/or background information We can safely assume that 5%* of the population lacks all of these things. Source: your mom lol
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Feb 19, 2024 05:15
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I'm not likely to fall victim to a scam, but the tradeoff there is I am really paranoid about everything. One of my credit cards sent me a text about a fraudulent charge, and then a couple more, and I ended up calling the number on the back of my card only to be told they were actual warnings, and my card needed to be replaced. Fast forward a bit and I get a similar voicemail from my bank, and I'm similarly skeptical. Calling the bank verified it was real, and also that they would lock my account if I didn't follow up forthwith. This kind of hypervigilance gets to be exhausting.
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Feb 19, 2024 06:01
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I’ve refused to give information to the bank on a call I’ve initiated from the number on the back of the card.
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Feb 19, 2024 06:11
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I’ve bitched before about PayPal texting me out of the blue, informing me that my transaction limit had been removed. Of course I instantly called the bank to ensure that no transactions had gone through and block the associated card. Turns out PayPal does this automatically and communicates it in the most suspicious way possible lol I still shut down my account because brain dead communication like that is hard to distinguish from fraud or a scam, things which have to be acted on immediately. Moral of the story is that the signal to noise ratio is such that it’s easy for scams to slip through because so much legitimate information is communicated in a sketchy way.
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Feb 19, 2024 06:12
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CaptainSarcastic posted:I'm not likely to fall victim to a scam, but the tradeoff there is I am really paranoid about everything. One of my credit cards sent me a text about a fraudulent charge, and then a couple more, and I ended up calling the number on the back of my card only to be told they were actual warnings, and my card needed to be replaced. I had to transfer the deposit for my new house recently, over £100k, which meant going into the bank to do a CHAPS payment and I spent the entire time trying to seem like I'd done my due diligence on the transfer (called the solicitor and verified the account details independently of the email they'd sent, that sort of thing) while also trying NOT to sound like someone who was over prepared because they were a fraudster. The bank staff have some prepared scripts to read when you're doing a transfer that big that include things like "scammers will tell you to lie to the bank about these things" and I had to try really hard not to say "yeah so I could just be lying, and I'd keep lying because the scammers had told me to, what does this achieve" but I kept my mouth shut because I didn't want to gently caress up my house purchase!
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Feb 19, 2024 08:42
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It's not that the scam has to be perfect, but the timing can be perfect. It may have been the YouTube scam buster mentioned above, but I remember one story by someone who definitely knew all about how scams work and still got scammed because they were in the middle of a super stressful day and they just didn't have the attention to spare. Like their kid was sick and they were on the way to the hospital but they got a flat tire and their MIL needed to be picked up at the airport and now loving Amazon needs me to do something too jesus christ OK will this bullshit ever end and then 3 days later they're out 3 grand or something.
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Feb 19, 2024 10:16
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Fil5000 posted:I had to transfer the deposit for my new house recently, over £100k, which meant going into the bank to do a CHAPS payment and I spent the entire time trying to seem like I'd done my due diligence on the transfer (called the solicitor and verified the account details independently of the email they'd sent, that sort of thing) while also trying NOT to sound like someone who was over prepared because they were a fraudster. The bank staff have some prepared scripts to read when you're doing a transfer that big that include things like "scammers will tell you to lie to the bank about these things" and I had to try really hard not to say "yeah so I could just be lying, and I'd keep lying because the scammers had told me to, what does this achieve" but I kept my mouth shut because I didn't want to gently caress up my house purchase! USAA bank had me jump through a rather impressive number of hoops before I could send a large (~$120k) wire transfer for the down payment on my house. What I found really interesting is that a lot of the questions were open ended like "how did you receive this destination account number?" and they put my call to them on hold and called me back via another verified phone number on the account. I thought the call was a nifty way to protect against someone faking my number, but I just now realized that it also would be highly likely to cause me to reveal that someone else was on another line coaching me through the process if that were happening. I read an article which made a rather compelling argument that some pretty significant details don't add up in that lady's story about falling for the scam, the big one being that you can't just go into a bank and get $50k in cash. Not only would the bank interrogate you about why you were trying to get $50k in cash, most bank branches simply don't have that much cash on hand.
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Feb 19, 2024 12:36
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Shifty Pony posted:I thought the call was a nifty way to protect against someone faking my number, but I just now realized that it also would be highly likely to cause me to reveal that someone else was on another line coaching me through the process if that were happening. I'm not following here - how is it likely to cause you to reveal that?
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Feb 19, 2024 13:29
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Red Oktober posted:I'm not following here - how is it likely to cause you to reveal that? Can't receive a phone call because the line is already in use and the scammer won't be able to talk to the victim if they are put them on hold.
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Feb 19, 2024 14:12
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I've got a really strong feeling that the shoebox of cash story is something she made up that she feels is less embarrassing than how she actually lost the money. It could have been a romance scam, drug habit, cam models, gambling, lots of stuff. I can't wait for the Streisand effect to play out on this
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Feb 19, 2024 16:41
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greazeball posted:I've got a really strong feeling that the shoebox of cash story is something she made up that she feels is less embarrassing than how she actually lost the money.
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Feb 19, 2024 17:26
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My mother was scammed out of a good amount of cash, in a way that sounds a little ridiculous. They were calling claiming to be me, that I had been in a car accident, and my phone had been damaged which is why I wasn't picking up when she tried calling me to confirm. I was in prison, see, and the lawyer needed cash to pay for my bail (this was before Jersey eliminated cash bail). My mother is intelligent, competent, and generally savvy to this kind of thing. She's not getting slow mentally, and from the outside she could tell you exactly what went wrong here and when. She got got, because they found a way to use the little bit of info they had, she was unable to disprove the story so it sounded plausible, they used emotional pressure to put her into a more suggestible state, and they kept continuous pressure on her to prevent her from having time to think. When I looked at my phone half an hour afterwards, seeing frantic texts and phone calls, it was too late. Once the scammers had the money and left, she started actually being able to critically think and realized just how fishy the whole thing was. She's not someone I would ever have considered a possible mark, but it happened. It's hubris to assume that you don't also have some combination of pressure points that causes you to stop thinking. Humans are fallable, all of us, in one way or another. Volmarias fucked around with this message at 20:32 on Feb 19, 2024 |
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Feb 19, 2024 20:28
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Yeah, thinking you’re not the person that can be scammed puts you halfway there for the scammer
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Feb 19, 2024 20:37
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shbobdb is a legendarily awful poster and not engaging with their reregs is a winning strategy.
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Feb 19, 2024 21:19
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I'm sure that I am capable of being scammed, especially if I'm tired/stressed/distracted, and even in ways that would be obvious to an outside observer or to myself in a better frame of mind. I've almost logged into a fake Amazon page because I got a message right when I was waking up and I was expecting an important package, for instance. I agree generally that falling for a scam shouldn't be something to be ashamed of, that there are professionals at the other end who are experienced at manipulation. I think there's room to hold that all true and also say that it's loving wild that this lady handed $50k in cash to some person claiming to be CIA. Like, there was that one principal who tried sending $100k of money to someone catfishing her claiming to be Elon Musk; I'm sure that I'm capable of being catfished but there's degrees.
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Feb 19, 2024 21:35
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Have no money and you will be scam proof. One weird trick scammers hate.
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Feb 20, 2024 05:15
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Every one of us is susceptible to being scammed... Because we already were. We paid ten bucks to post here!!!!!!
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Feb 20, 2024 07:32
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The worst part is I'm still convinced this was a great ten bucks to spend
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Feb 20, 2024 08:45
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I've had my tenbux worth out of SA at least a hundred times over I think. The PC part picking megathread alone has stopped me from wasting money on garbage. In fact the one time I bought a PC without reading that thread in the last fifteen years (I was in a hurry, my previous PC had broken and I was days away from my second kid being born so I didn't have time to build one) it wound up being garbage. If you can amortise that ten bucks over twenty years or so it's surprisingly good value.
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Feb 20, 2024 09:25
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Yeah, plus aside from the occasional nut, it’s a good barrier. Probably the best $10 I’ve ever spent, besides New Vegas
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Feb 20, 2024 11:30
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Fil5000 posted:I've had my tenbux worth out of SA at least a hundred times over I think. The PC part picking megathread alone has stopped me from wasting money on garbage. In fact the one time I bought a PC without reading that thread in the last fifteen years (I was in a hurry, my previous PC had broken and I was days away from my second kid being born so I didn't have time to build one) it wound up being garbage. Yeah I need to go ask about laptops and getting a new one soon. my old one is struggling a bit these days
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Feb 20, 2024 13:00
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SettingSun posted:And you, oh great scam detector, can be a victim if the circumstances meet your specific criteria. Those criteria are probably vanishingly unlikely because of your skepticism but it's the height of avarice to assume you are immune. There's a story about a good scam sniffing youtuber who fell for the fake youtube support scam and lost his account because through a combination of spear phishing and highly convincing email spoofing it looked completely legitimate. dictionary.com posted:avarice noun How on earth is "I wouldn't empty my bank account into a shoe box and hand it to someone" and "if I thought an LEO was investigating me for a crime, I'd immediately get a lawyer" indicative of an excessive or insatiable desire for wealth? I certainly like having my money, but I don't think 'I don't want to put my savings in a shoe box and give it to someone' is excessively greedy, and 'get a lawyer if the police are questioning you' comes from a desire to not end up in prison, which isn't usually considered 'avarice'. The idea that scams are magical things you can't use situational awareness on is strange but I can at least get where it's coming from, but the idea that being aware of scams indicates that you're greedy is just bizarre.
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Feb 20, 2024 16:23
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Pantaloon Pontiff posted:How on earth is "I wouldn't empty my bank account into a shoe box and hand it to someone" and "if I thought an LEO was investigating me for a crime, I'd immediately get a lawyer" indicative of an excessive or insatiable desire for wealth? I certainly like having my money, but I don't think 'I don't want to put my savings in a shoe box and give it to someone' is excessively greedy, and 'get a lawyer if the police are questioning you' comes from a desire to not end up in prison, which isn't usually considered 'avarice'. I'm pretty sure they meant hubris.
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Feb 20, 2024 16:33
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Volmarias posted:My mother was scammed out of a good amount of cash, in a way that sounds a little ridiculous. They were calling claiming to be me, that I had been in a car accident, and my phone had been damaged which is why I wasn't picking up when she tried calling me to confirm. I was in prison, see, and the lawyer needed cash to pay for my bail (this was before Jersey eliminated cash bail). Not me.
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Feb 20, 2024 16:37
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Professor Shark posted:Yeah, plus aside from the occasional nut, it’s a good barrier. Where you nutting for only $10 My mom’s house?
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Feb 20, 2024 16:39
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